Vanishings
by Disciple Of The Dragon Star
Summary: Because it isn't easy to cherish someone who has vanished from your life and left something so intangible behind. And memories can only do so much. GinRan set after the Winter War.


**Vanishings / A Drowning Wish**

**Wow...a second fanfic huh...I seem to be possessed by the Bleach spirit. This is GinRan and those who don't like it can stay away. No flaming. I think that there ought to be a tribute to the man who lived as a traitor but died a true hero.  
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Matsumoto Rangiku was drinking again.

She sipped the sake almost daintily from the saucer, unusually prim for a woman who normally downed four in one go. As she set the saucer down, some disinterested part of her mind noted how silvery and clear the liquid was.

_**You are gone already **_

_**Yet it feels like the world is holding on to you. **_

_**Every little thing like a piece of memory** _

_**it materialises to mock me.**_

She shook the strawberry curls from around her shoulder and paused, looking at the sake in the saucer. In the pristine white container and illuminated by the last red rays from the setting sun, the drink was turned a bloody red.

Just like the blood that stained her fingers as she cradled his broken form.

Just like the life blood that escaped in trickles across his pale skin as he died in her arms.

_**So many people don't know I think **_

_**Don't know that I'm drowning myself to forget. **_

_**Forget the past and the would be future **_

_**Your death ripped from my hands. **_

She grabbed the saucer and threw it across the room.

As the sound of tinkling glass filled the quiet space, her hands shook as she gazed at them in a sort of self loathing disgust.

They were not the usual elegant and manicured hands the normal her cooed over and lavished nail polish upon.

They were tainted. Stained. Stained with the blood of the man who left her, believed to have betrayed her, and in the end died for her as a hero.

_"We'll take your birthday as the day we met. All right?"_

And the memories flooded her - memories of a silver haired, sly boy who rescued her from death. The boy who left her to avenge her. The boy who came and went like a silver fox, the man who was never who he seemed.

_**And it seems like **_

_**Everything I knew was an illusion **_

_**You - me - everything you did **_

_**Is crumbling now **_

_**Like a shattered mirror fades to silver dust.**_

She shook all over now, grey eyes contracted and almost shut in pain.

He is everywhere in her life. In her mind, in her heart. But it seems like no one but her remembers. Ichimaru never left her anything. Nothing to cherish, nothing to remember him by. And it is like he vanished from the earth as thoroughly as he left her life.

_**The world turns **_

_**And people move with it **_

_**But I am frozen in time where I can **_

_**Hold you again and again **_

_**In a past that will never be once more.**_

But that is what he intended wasn't it?

To leave her nothing. Because had Gin Ichimaru left even the smallest sign of his existence she would have clung so desperately to that one strand that she would have remained stuck in an endless cycle of regret and sadness.

But he knew her so well. He never left any trace behind. He intended her to move on.

She hated it.

She hated how he knew her so well.

She hated the cruelty with which he left her with but she knew it was necessary to move on like that. She just wished it could have been otherwise. Because it is always painful to live with only the intangible memories of someone to cherish them by.

But she will move on. She will be strong the way he intended her to be. And she will let go of the pain in her full heart. A muffled sob escaped her throat as she buried her face in the crook of one arm.

Whether she is crying because she is drunk or because she is genuinely upset she does not know.

But the last thing she sees as she quietly cries herself to sleep is a forest.

A green, lush forest.

And a silver fox, a sly cunning grin stretched over it's face while it's slanted eyes gleam with wicked humour.

And the way the fox almost seems to wink at her...

Before running off into the misty expanses of the green forest, no pawprints on the ground left behind.

It vanishes without a trace.

But even in her sleep, Rangiku's lips turn up in a smile as she hears it's barking laughter echoing through the strange forest.

And when Captain Hitsugaya Toushiro returns later that night and sees her slumped over the desk with tear stains running down her cheeks and a smile on her lips he refrains from yelling at her to wake up. He quietly sweeps up the fragments of broken china and exits the office, leaving her to sleep peacefully.

He can always scold her about the paperwork the next day...

**So. Good? Bad? Don't care? Please review. No flames. **


End file.
